Thank you!

Thank you for all the support you've given the Climbing Rose Young Adult line of The Wild Rose Press. Our stories are still available on The Wild Rose Press website, however, since we aren't publishing new stories, our blog is no longer active. We thank you again for the time you spent with us and invite you to visit our Climbing Rose bookstore.

Here are two photos of one of my mammoth sunflowers, located at the side of the house. Amazingly enough, this particular sunflower arrived early; it was a seed left over from last year that didn't bloom. It waited until this year to bloom early. This has never happened to me before. Sunflowers are annuals and don't normally bloom a year later, but this one did. It bloomed before the ones that I planted in the early summer.This is a close-up shot of the same sunflower. I adore my sunflowers; they are all over the front patch of ground in front of my house, in the small patch to the side, and in the long patch running alongside my house. I planted a lot of different varieties this year; some of the sunflowers are quite small, with short petals and big centers. I also have a lovely batch of darkish red/brown sunflowers with nearly black centers. They are truly unique and not at all what you would expect to see in a sunflower. I'll share some photos of those sunflowers tomorrow. The flower here is contained in the small patch to the side. We also installed a vegetable garden this year, and the tomatoes are bursting out! I particularly love the cherry tomatoes; they go so beautifully in a crisp green salad.Gardens take a lot of work, and they take a number of years to develop. We moved into our house a long time ago, and the garden has been evolving over these many years. Every autumn, I buy several bags of tulip bulbs and send my kids outside to plant them. As long as they don't get planted in the yard (the tulips, not the children), my husband doesn't care where they get planted. One year, I did plant bulbs in the yard, because I thought it would be 'nice' to have bulbs popping up all over the yard. It annoyed my husband no end, because he does the mowing, and he got frustrated with having to avoid the tulip stalks. So no bulbs in the yard.